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I decided it to update my list of famous tech drop-outs. Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook Bill Gates – Microsoft Steve Jobs – Apple Michael Dell – Dell Larry Ellison – Oracle Mike Lazaridis – Blackberry Shawn Fanning – Napster Blake Ross – Firefox I am sure you can help me complete my…
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I will make a prediction. Optical disks, such as DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Rays, and so on, will not matter in five years. And no, tape will not replace them. I see only one viable storage technology in five years: fast volatile memory hooked up to a super-fast network. Why will it happen? One word:…
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(source) Facebook has been the hot networking site for quite some time now. Founded in 2004 by a teenager, this same teenager, Mark Zuckerberg, is now 23, has no degree, and is about 2300 times richer than I will ever be. (No, I am not bitter.) Some colleagues asked me to join facebook today. My…
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What happens after a technological singularity?
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(source) A technological singularity is a rapid sequence of technological changes tearing apart our society. For example, imagine we can create smarter-than-human-beings machine. Suppose that, in turn, these machines can create other machines that are even smarter than they are. If the timing is…
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Michael has a long post on why it seems foolish to measure scientist according to one unidimensional metric (such as the H-index). His argument is mostly that you can game these metrics rather easily if you have a large enough social network. Given how hard people work at gaming the PageRank…
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I reminded a member of our staff of the following quote yesterday: Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. (Dijkstra) But what happens to astronomy when everyone owns a telescope? If you had millions of people using telescopes for 8 hours a day, what would…
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A common problem in information retrieval is that words are ambiguous. That is a fancy way of saying that you cannot tell the meaning of a word when you take it out of context. Some people claim that this problem must be solved by using the Semantic Web. I have long advocated that the Semantic Web…
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We just found a major MacOS bug, but there seems to be no trace of it on the Web, so I am posting this here hoping that someone can help. We tested several machines and whenever you have an ethernet connection, trying to do an HTTP POST request with a sizeable load (such as editing a large article…
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Erik Duval asks for help. He points out that it is extremely difficult to figure out who cites him, how often, and so on. Using a tool offered by librarians (Web of Science) gives highly accurate, but also highly incomplete results. Meanwhile, Google Scholar fares better, but gives noisy data which…
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Assessing a researcher… in 2007
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Great video on online education
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Search, Google, and Life: Sergey Brin
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Software Is Hard: you bet!
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Stephen Downes posted this great video: If you care about online learning, listen to it. I think Stephen had some trouble initially, but stay with it, it is worth it. I love this quote: It is all about learning, not content. I didn’t know about Will Richardson.
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Here is a great talk by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
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In Software Is Hard, Kyle Wilson proposes a law of software development: It is impossible, by examining any significant piece of completed code, to determine within a factor of two how many man-hours it took to produce that code. (Oh! I think that he is being generous. I doubt you can estimate…
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(source) The CEO of Sun (Jonathan Schwartz) has decided to refocus his company on storage, or so he said on his blog. So far so good. I do not think you can endlessly assume that people will want more computing power, as it comes with a growing electricity bill, but you can assume they will always…
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The medium is the message, in Computer Science?
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(source) We should all know that the medium is the message. What does it mean for research in Computer Science? I have done some work recently on tag clouds. What is fascinating is that a new widget changes in several significant ways how we perceive what would otherwise be classical problems. You…